Editing Athasian Dragon (section)

==3rd Edition==
[[File:Dragon king Dragon 339.png|right|100px]]
In 3rd edition, the Athasian dragon appeared as an epic level prestige class in [[Dragon Magazine]] #339, cutting out most of the stuff that made AD&D's Dragon progression a real pain in the ass. Instead of casting spells with a flat chance of killing you just to level up, you could level up normally. You still had to put up with the bullshit of the DM taking control of your character at certain levels, though.

Like in AD&D, characters can gain draconic traits slowly, adding more bulk and power with each level. In addition, at every level other than 1st, 4th, 7th and 10th, you gain spellcasting abilities as if you had gained a level in an arcane or manifester (psionic) class. By the end, an Athasian dragon is Huge size, can burrow and fly, can use all a normal dragon's melee attacks and Frightful Presence, and can breath a cone of sand dealing 10d12 points of damage. And that's on top of the character's spellcasting abilities and epic feats. They can also drain hit points from the creatures around them to protect them from the backlash of epic level spells.

What's the catch? Simple: prestige class bullshit. To join the epic prestige class, you have to have 24 points in both Knowledge (Arcana) and Knowledge (Psionics), have the Epic Spellcasting and Great Fortitude feats along with two metamagic and -psionic feats (each), '''and''' be able to cast both 9th-level spells and 6th-level psionic powers. Short of taking a god-awful PrC like cerebremancer, it was extremely difficult to enter as any kind of effective character in most scenarios. Unless you're playing with gestalt rules, in which case this is a piece of cake to enter...provided you sacrifice no less than 1,000 HD of living creatures and 50,000 gp.

So while having the option was nice, the finagling required to get it working in a normal game meant that it wasn't really worth the trouble.